Race in Your Community

I am a white American. I was born and raised in a small town call Antioch here in Tennessee. It is about 10 minutes from Nashville. Here we have always had a high diversity of races, cultures, skin colors, and religions within our community. It was normal to be different. No one truly ever looked just like someone else, unless they were twins. I would say that some people look like me in some ways, and in some ways they don’t. Here, there are old people, and young people, Tall people, and short people, overweight people, and really skinny people. There are also dark people, and light people. There are countless languages spoken within this colorful community. This community that I call home is made up of Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Japanese, Somali, Indians, Puerto Ricans, and so many more. The one thing that makes us look alike in some way would be because we all have one heart, we all have red blood, and we are all living for the same purpose. We are working hard to survive and feed our families. We share common determination and feed off each other’s motivation. We all recognize the differences between us and it does not bother us like it would in other cities.
Even though everyone in my community is different, we are all still treated the same by our local leaders. We all have to spend just as much money on food and fuel. No one gets special privileges that aren’t offered to everyone. If a family isn’t doing well they get offered help from the state. That same help is offered to other families that are not doing well regardless of the way they look. I think the reason there isn’t much favoritism here is because there is so much diverse here, that no one really out numbers anyone. The people in this community recognize that and have grown a respect for everyone. Even the police department is made up of a colorful team, where it is just as diverse as the community. We all will...